Steel is worried about the FDA announcement that they will allow cloned animals into the food system.

Tanya Steel: You know I have thought a lot about veganism lately.  And one thing that really made me think about it was this past week when the FDA said they were going to allow cloned animals in the food supply system.  And not only were they gonna be allowed into the system, but they were not gonna be labeled as such.  Now that to me is very scary.  And for the first time in my life I thought, “You know what?  I might just opt out of this,” because I can’t trust . . .  No matter what the FDA says to me, I just can’t believe it.  I can’t believe that that’s really, completely safe.  And so for the first time in my life I started to think about becoming a vegan.  And actually Moby, who is a musician that I know is on Big Think, is a vegan.  And we just filmed something for Epicurious with Moby talking about being a vegan.  And I understand . . .  My head understands the ethical reasons for being a vegan, but my stomach never did.  And now my stomach and my head are starting to unite, and I’m starting to think about maybe trying it.  It is a very hard way to live a life, I think.  I’m not sure.  I mean I do want to kind of . . . kind of take some baby steps towards that.  I do worry about it for my kids – you know about how much dairy.  I try to buy organic milk when I can, but I know that there’s hormones and antibiotics going into their system with the amount of milk that they drink all the time, and it’s very hard to stop that from happening.  And how do you stop it?  You stop eating dairy, fish, and meat.  So it is something that I think is   . . .  We’re gonna see a huge, huge rise in veganism in this country.  And actually at Epicurious we’ve been talking about trying to develop a whole lot more recipes for vegans.

Recorded on 1/17/08